


and I would put them back into poetry

by eva_cybele



Category: Persona 3
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-08-05
Updated: 2015-04-13
Packaged: 2018-02-11 23:02:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 2,792
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2086434
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eva_cybele/pseuds/eva_cybele
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Prompt fills for a word meme on tumblr. Mostly Shinjiro/Minako and Akihiko/Mitsuru.</p><p>Chapter 4: Tarantism, the urge to overcome melancholy by dancing, Minako Arisato.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Apodyopis

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Apodyopis - The act of mentally undressing someone.

It had been all Shinjiro-senpai’s fault, really. He had expressly forbidden her to help him cook dinner, and he wasn’t the most talkative guy even when he wasn’t trying to both cook and teach Fuuka, so she really had no choice except to watch him. 

At first she was watching the actual cooking, trying to figure out what dishes he was preparing, but she soon grew bored with that and started watching the cook himself. Large, rough hands moved with absolute steadiness and confidence over the various cooking implements, and Minako found herself wondering if they’d be so capable when put to other tasks. 

From his hands she moved to his arms. No doubt he had to be fairly muscular in order to swing that huge axe around, but he always wore that damn peacoat, so she didn’t know for sure. Was he all lean lines, like Akihiko-senpai, or was he bulkier? Come to think of it, she didn’t even know what he wore under the coat — she had literally never seen him without it, even though it was still summer. It looked like maybe a turtleneck. Did he get cold easily? 

He was tall, broad-shouldered and long-legged, and that was definitely a plus. Minako had always liked tall guys — they towered over her, making her feel tiny and delicate, which made it even better when she could wrap them around her little finger. Not that she would ever dream of using her cuteness for evil.

Definitely good-looking, though, no matter how hard he tried to hide it under the whole hobo-badboy getup. Her fingers almost itched to steal his beanie so she could see what his hair looked like without it. Maybe run her hands through it, see if it was as soft as it looked. There was a hint of stubble along his chin that was particularly appealing.

No matter how hard she tried to keep it firmly on dry land, Minako’s brain kept jumping headfirst into the gutter. Even listening to him give Fuuka instructions was getting under her skin, his voice all gravelly and deep like that.

 _Face it, Mina, you have a serious problem here._  

The feeling only intensified when Shinjiro turned and caught her staring at him, his eyebrows pulled down in suspicion. Minako put on her biggest, sunniest smile and wiggled her fingers in a wave. His face shifted through several subtle expressions, that she was pretty sure were confusion, amusement, and then a flash of faint fondness. She might have been imagining it, though. For all that she was good — like, really, almost freakishly good — at reading people, he was still something of a mystery. Which only made him more attractive, really.

_Ugh. I am in **so**  much trouble._


	2. Mamihlapinatapei

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mamihlapinatapei - The look between two people in which each loves the other but is too afraid to make the first move.

“Geez, why are we even out here?”

“C’mon, Yuka-tan, like you don’t wanna know what our senpai are doing when they think all the kids are in bed.”

“Um, you guys, I don’t think we should be doing this… Even if Kirijo-senpai and Sanada-senpai are secretly dating, we shouldn’t be spying on them. It’s rude.”

“There’s no ‘if’ about this, Fuuka. I know you’ve seen the way they look at each other. Akihiko practically worships the ground Mitsuru walks on, and he’s the only one that she talks to. And you can’t say that it’s because they’re old comrades, because she treats Shinjiro-senpai totally different! No, they’re in love, and they’re either dating or they’re too afraid to admit it, which means that they need our help.”

“Minako-san, should I consider this ‘Operation: Senpai Stalking’ a high priority stealth mission? Because if so, we are about to be interrupted, and I must take agressive action to preserve our cover--”

“Aigis! No guns in the dorm!”

Shinjiro opened the door to his room and leaned against the frame, levelling a look at the cluster of juniors huddled at the end of the hall. “What the hell are you morons doing?”

Five heads swivelled his direction, wearing expressions that ranged from alarm (Iori and Takeba) to embarrassment (Yamagishi) to determination (Aigis and Arisato). 

The leader of the group shoved Aigis’s arms down from where they’d been pointing at him, and flashed him her sunniest smile. Maybe he hadn’t been around for too long but even Shinjiro knew that expression meant nothing but trouble for anyone on the receiving end.

“We’re just trying to confirm a hypothesis. Doing a little observational science, you know. Wanna help?”

“I could hear you guys talking when I was in my room. If you’re trying to catch Aki and Mitsuru doing something, you ought to give it up already. Or at least keep it down.”

Takeba tipped her head at him. “So, senpai, have they always been like this?”

“Hah! Knew you were curious, Yuka-tan.” 

“Shut it, Stupei.” 

Shinjiro just shook his head in bemusement. Kids. “What do you mean, ‘like this’?”

Arisato reached over and grabbed a handful of his coat and tugged, and after a moment, Shinjiro allowed himself to be pulled over into the group. Leaning out around the corner showed Aki and Mitsuru deep in conversation, bent over the screen of Mitsuru’s laptop, almost-but-not-quite close enough to touch. Aki’s eyes kept flicking up to Mitsuru’s face as she talked, and Mitsuru’s hair kept brushing his shoulder as she would lean in to point at something, and then quickly pull back. So basically, they were doing the same shit they’d always done. Not that Shinjiro blamed the kids for reading into it -- but Mitsuru’s lack of romantic inclinations and Aki’s total obliviousness meant that even if there was something there, neither one would actually notice, much less admit it.

Truth was, both of them were afraid of losing the things that were most important to them, so they didn’t let people get that close. Even Arisato, who seemed to be able to make friends with literally anyone or anything, himself included, had been complaining that Aki never wanted to hang out lately, and he knew that Mitsuru was probably the only member of SEES who interacted with the girl on a strictly professional basis. Not that any of them would understand the impulse to push people away. The juniors were all clingy types, more likely to hang on tighter when the going got tough than anything.

Shinjiro shook his head. “They’re just friends. Mind your own damn business next time, got it? And go to bed, you all have school tomorrow.” And maybe his voice was a little gruffer than he really felt, but, well, Mitsuru and Aki weren’t the only ones afraid to let someone get too close. The difference was that he had a reason for it.

The juniors dispersed with some grumbling, the girls up the stairs and Iori to his own room down the hall, leaving Shinjiro staring at the door across his own, the one marked Amada. 

He glanced over to see Arisato lingering on the bottom step of the staircase, watching him with a look in her eye that suggested that she saw more than most people.

She caught his eye and smiled slightly. “Goodnight, senpai.”


	3. Cheiloproclitic

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cheiloproclitic - Being attracted to someone’s lips.

The first thing that Shinjiro ever noticed about her was her smile. It was polite, cautious even, but genuine in a way that he wasn’t used to seeing from strangers. Normally they looked at him like he was going to punch them and take their wallet or some shit, but she didn’t waver. It was sort of refreshing, but he didn’t expect to see her again. A girl that nice, up against a bunch of shadows? No way that would turn out well.

The second time they met, his head still aching from slamming it into some punk’s, he got to see that smile again. If the last one had been warm, this one was like the surface of the goddamn sun, almost blinding in its brightness. Sure, he had just run off some assholes who were trying to give her and her friends a hard time, so she was grateful, but the brightness didn’t dim a bit even under the full force of his sternest glare. Even Aki usually wilted a little bit when Shinjiro looked that pissed, and that guy was about as empathetic as a pet rock. Either she was stupid or stubborn, and he really wasn’t sure which would be worse.

The third time, when Aki came to him with the perky little S.E.E.S. junior in tow and named her Minako Arisato, their combat leader, she didn’t smile at all. She was all business, radiating a calm competence that reminded him uncannily of Mitsuru, though without the frosty detachment.

After he came back to the dorms, he had the opportunity to observe Arisato in her native environment. The sunny cheerfulness seemed to be her default setting, only lapsing into leader-mode when it was absolutely necessary.

She started dragging him out for dinner in the evenings, sometimes, or to the shrine to walk the dog with her. She talked, and laughed, and smiled, but up close and with no one else around, Shinjiro noticed that though the smile was genuine enough, it was tempered by a certain amount of sadness in her eyes. It was an ache that he recognized all too well, and never would have expected in such a cheerful, open-hearted girl. Every night he spent with her revealed another facet, another layer, another mystery to the puzzle that was Minako Arisato. How someone could be simultaneously so open and so guarded, so different depending on her surroundings and yet completely genuine, he had no damn clue. Even after listening to her talk for an entire evening, watching her emotions play across her face as she told story after story about friends and classmates, still he couldn’t define her, couldn’t put her in a category or figure her out at all.

As the month wore on, sometimes he’d catch her chewing on her bottom lip, looking up at him through her lashes or out of the corner of her eye, the air between them charged with a tension that he didn’t dare identify. When she gave him back his pocketwatch, she didn’t smile at all -- just stared straight into him like she could see not only what it meant to him, but what it would mean in the future as well. Like she knew every facet of its significance. He didn’t know why then, but she seemed almost desperate as she pressed it into his hand.

Then, later, two days before the end, the tension that had been building in her for days seemed to wind itself to a breaking point, and marched straight from the front door over to where he stood in the corner, and blurted out that she loved him. He tried playing it off -- no way did she need a complication like him in her life, no matter how deep they’d wormed their way under each other’s skin -- but she wasn’t taking no for an answer, and eventually she wore down all of his defenses. She barged into his room and into his heart, and she was so damn sincere and earnest about it that he didn’t have the strength (or even the desire, if he was honest with himself) to make her leave.

So she stayed. When he relented, and finally let himself accept what she offered, he was rewarded with the warmest, most beautiful smile he’d ever seen in his life, like love distilled down into perfect bow-shaped pink lips and the slightest glimpse of crooked teeth.

(Her mouth made other shapes that night, images that seared themselves on the back of his eyelids, but that’s a story for another time, and not one that he’s willing to tell to anyone besides himself.)

The next night his gentle reminders for her to go spend time with her friends made her pout, lower lip pursed and heaven help him he wanted to kiss her, but he held firm. She spent the evening laughing and studying with the other juniors, shooting him looks from time to time like she wanted him to join them, but it was enough to watch her in her natural habitat one last time.

The night after that was the full moon, and she cried, even though he asked her not to. He watched her fight to stop, to smile through her tears, and it was the first time he’d ever seen her fake one. It hurt more than the gunshot did.

After that was the coma, and the dreams, and who knew what was truth and what was memory, but she gave him the strength to drag himself back to the surface, her voice leading him ever onwards, towards the light of day. There was a promise he needed to keep, even if he hadn’t been there to make it in person.

He finally saw her smile again for real, one last time, on graduation day.

 

_I’m glad I met you._

 


	4. Tarantism

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tarantism - The urge to overcome melancholy by dancing.

So the world was ending.

Ryoji was an incarnation of death, and Chidori was dead, and so was Mitsuru-senpai’s dad, and Shinji was in the hospital on the brink of death, and so was Akinari, and Bebe had gone back to France, and Maiko had moved away with her mom, and the entire world was literally going to end.

Minako was pretty sure no one could have blamed her if she had just broken down into sobs, or hysterical laughter, or maybe taken a page out of the Apathy Syndrome book and turned into a zombie.

But she didn’t. What would be the point? She’d learned quickly that no amount of crying would bring the dead back to life, and railing against the injustice of the universe wouldn’t change a damn thing. If the gods answered prayers, they’d certainly never paid much mind to hers throughout the years.

So she did the only things she could do: she went to school, and she hung out with her friends, and she sang karaoke and waited tables at Chagall and studied. She made herself so busy that there was no time to think about the doom that lingered over their heads.

And when even that wasn’t enough, she went to Escapade.

Mutatsu had stopped wearing a dent in his usual booth months ago, but she could almost feel him staring at her disapprovingly as she wound her way onto the dance floor. The strobe lights pulsed in time with her heart, and Minako reached for Cybele, letting the goddess’s exultation in the beat rise to settle just under her skin. The club was the closest modern equivalent to the ecstatic orgies that Cybele had once inspired her worshippers to, and she thought of the entirety of Escapade as her dominion. Here, it was easy to stop being Minako for a while, to let all of her human concerns be subsumed by the “wild ritual,” as Elizabeth had so aptly named it.

No one bothered her, even the normally predatory men on the fringes of the dance floor, the ones who looked at a school uniform and saw weakness or a challenge. Cybele tended to have that effect on people. After all, her priests were known for castrating themselves. Even if they weren’t directly aware of her, on some subconscious level, most men would back down the moment Cybele came to the forefront of Minako’s mind.

Lust, always a side-effect of letting a fertility goddess rule her thoughts, flushed Minako’s skin as she danced, her movements turning more liquid and sensual than she’d intended. It would have been easy, with the Lovers arcana guiding her words and actions, to have her pick of any of the dancers or the wallflowers, to drag them off into a corner and let a rush of endorphins wipe her mind clean of everything.

Giving into that urge felt too much like nihilism, too much like acknowledging that the world was ending, and that living like normal was pointless. Normal, non-doomed Minako might entertain the idea of meaningless sex with strangers, but she certainly wouldn’t actually do it, so there was no reason to change now.

Instead, she gave herself over fully to the music, feeling the bass echo in her chest like a phantom heartbeat, sweat slicking her skin like she’d gone for a nice, long after-dark run. It didn’t take long for the music in the club to be drowned out by the music in her head -- cymbals and drums and over it all, a simple melody, carried by a lyre.

Cybele and Attis, Dionysus and Orpheus. Life that existed in defiance of death.

And for the first time since she’d called him forth, Thanatos lay still and silent within the sea of her soul.


End file.
